Find a burning platform
Find a burning platform
In the near decade funk of "software eating the world" there are still plenty of companies who see no need to change. They might be right: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Change addicts like us in the tech industry get all frumped by this take: we're taught that only the paranoid survive, Gerstner Lore, and Disruption/disruption, Amazon, blah blah.
What if sales are going fine, maybe so well that you're done moving all your inventory by August? Or your manufacturing firm is doing just fine with pipefitting - Alphabet has no interest in the simple act of moving things from point A to point B.
Thirty one years later we still constantly hear that "only the paranoid survive". People have to be reminded, tho, and all the stories of Amazon eating markets still don't phase some folks.
Rita McGrath makes the case that Facebook has lost touch with paranoia - at least lost enough to believe and address problems with its business model. If Steve Jobs used a reality distortion field to market Apple, she's saying, Facebook points the reality distortion field inwards. (This is a devilish turn of an anecdotes - the tech companies are the ones fucking up, not us shaving cream people!)
Plenty of people go sane and lose the paranoia. You have to be paranoid about not being paranoid. Even Microsoft turned goofy!
If you're in this stagnation situation, you need to find a crisis, a burning platform, to motivate people to slog through changing how their teams operate and are structured, how they measure success and punish failure, and to become curious again to invent new ways operating.
You might have to invent a crisis, maybe an intellectual one that takes a pile of Mary Meeker slides and infers some encroaching destruction.
I'm playing around with calling this tracking The Dediu Cliff, inspired by Horace Dediu's tracking of mobile replacing PCs as the dominate "computer":
You can create charts like this for other markets, like this one for insurance:
Change nuts like to recite and start innovation business books with: Blockbuster! Toys'R'Us! Circuit City! Nokia!
The mystery of these cases is why these companies (especially Nokia and Blackberry) didn't get paranoid. Their downfall was obvious to all, but seems to have been ignored. Is it arrogance and slack-jawed yokeling in an expensive suit? An inward facing reality distortion field? Maybe shareholders can't stomach the margin hits and risk of transforming, and move their capital to better bets, starving the company's ability to change.
In contrast, Adobe seems fine (remember when they seemed doomed because Photoshop was bound to the desktop, Flash had lost against the iPhone and Android, and the PDF money had dried up?) and you're seeing several retailers compete with Amazon; banking seems kind of impervious to ankle-biting upstarts.
In theory, your strategy group should signal when it's time to be paranoid, when your market is no longer locked up and protected. Or, as in the case of Dediu Cliffs, when the definition of your market changes.
Even if senior leadership is freaking out, if there's no burning platform - no obvious reason to change - people in the company will be resistant to change change, or change too slow. And why not: if it ain't broke, don't fix it (OTOH!). They don't feel the need, or believe the urgency. So, if you're freaking out, find a crisis quick, create one, or find a new job.
Original programming
Platform as a Product as #cfsummit this year:
Software Defined Talk #197 - in this episode: the season of IPOs, bullshit HR tells you about salary, and feeding ravenous 9 year olds.
Dumb ideas in small doses
https://twitter.com/cote/status/1176045214408089600
Seasons
This is one reason I’ve found the metaphor of “seasons,” stolen from irregularly-produced prestige TV, so useful. You can do things one “season” at a time, and define “season” however you like: six weeks, six months, a year. Will there be more seasons? Maybe! Simply by framing work this way, you re-establish some edges, and with them the possibility that, one day, your work might be done. Likewise, you set up a finish line: a moment to feel happy, and accomplished, and proud.
Without seasons, or edges, or finish lines, the only options that remain (I think?) are (a) infinite work forever, or (b) a slow fade into (optionally ashamed) silence.
-- "Week 39, features of a ninja house"
Startup CEO vs. CEO
In the context of discussion - yup - We, Matt Levine outlines a growth-to-valuation (startup) CEO versus a profit-to-sharholder value CEO:
an exceptionally talented unicorn-startup founder who is not suited to take WeWork public. His skill set consists of convincing private investors (convincing Masayoshi Son) that he is running a fast-growing tech company with huge network effects and economies of scale, and getting those investors (that investor) to invest billions of dollars at optimistic valuations. The one-on-one charisma, the ability to spin a grandiose vision, the mission statements about elevating consciousness rather than making money: All of these things stereotypically appeal to private tech investors (to Son) who want to change the world with unicorn investments.
They do not, apparently, in this particular case, appeal to big public investors. As WeWork goes public, it will need a different skill set, perhaps the skill set of a professional manager who can convince investors that WeWork is a category-leading furnished-office company with acceptable corporate governance. All the “community” stuff, the kooky eccentricities that charmed private investors (Son), are now liabilities.
I like to keep an eye on this distinction in (tech) business discussions. Canon tomes like The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Lean Startup are focused on a very specific use case: startup exits. (I suppose it could apply to companies in PE therapy, but whatever).
Much of the advice applies to any mode of a business, but you've got to keep you eye on the horizon of the tactics: are they geared towards building up a company's valuation leading to a cash out, or a long-running company that must produce profits?
On the other hand, much of the advice in HBR land applies to "regular" companies. It's why tech people roll their eyes at this section of business canon.
Positive rephrases
Why weren't we doing this all along?
⬇️
That looks like a good way to operate.
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What's wrong around here?
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What's working well?
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There is no strategy/plan/idea here!
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What can I do to help?
Quotes from a book
The cloud is one of the drivers of the digital revolution. It has reduced barriers to entry across industries, since new entrants no longer have to invest in hardware and datacenters before becoming operational. The infrastructure they need is immediately available and their costs—based on volume of use—remain low while their businesses have a chance to grow. The cloud helps provide the agility that enterprises need if they’re to succeed in their digital transformation. In addition to cost advantages and the ability to quickly scale up and down based on demand, it promotes agility by letting them try out innovative ideas, all the while decreasing their lead times and making it easy for them to scale globally.
-- War and Peace and IT by Mark Schwartz
Lead time is a very important metric because reducing it: • means removing waste from processes (this leads to cost reduction and improved employee morale); • reduces time to market for new products, and time to value for investments that affect internal users; • lets a company quickly try out ideas and get feedback on them, thereby increasing innovation and fit-to-need; • means coming closer to delivering as soon as possible; • reduces risk by reducing work-in-process (the amount of investment risk at any moment); • and helps keep systems more secure (the IT team will be able to respond to emerging threats more quickly, patch software more quickly, and respond to incidents more quickly). Lead time tells us”
-- War and Peace and IT by Mark Schwartz
The problem with budgets, he says, is that they’re entirely focused on what you put in, not what you get back.
-- War and Peace and IT by Mark Schwartz
Where's the workload?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48786369156/I can't tell you how much effort my team used to put into making a chart like this. And now, here it is! Probably even year/year if you subscribe.
As it says:
39% said they will be running the bulk of their workloads in public clouds by 2020, while 34% said they will be running workloads in a combination of hosted and on-premises, private clouds by 2020.
Relevant to your interests
Telling people that their hole is wrong isn't usually a good sales strategy. This is probably not terrible; it seems especially nice for family stuff: “you can play whatever you want in this plan, but not that coin collecting crap that’s not.” "The serious games I can leave to serious people." Who plans the birthday party? When you think of it, of course Dutch food has great drunk food.